Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  The scientific program was taking shape. There would be a full meteorological station wherever they finally landed on the northeastern coast of Greenland, with multiple daily measurements of temperature (including twenty-four-hour maxima and minima), humidity (by two methods), barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and cloud cover. There would be a full aerological program with as many kite and balloon flights as Alfred could manage, looking for layering, inversions, and air waves and measuring temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction aloft. Alfred also planned to direct the magnetic observatory, to study atmospheric electricity, and to record the aurora and other optical phenomena photographically. He planned to photograph ice crystals, clouds, ice, and rock formations; he was very keen about the photography and pleased that the expedition would travel with its own prefabricated darkroom.20

  The only major stumbling block in the preparations was getting a powered kite winch. The factory that was building the winch was in Eimsbüttel, a district of Hamburg, where, until recently, Wladimir Köppen had lived with his very large family. This had made it natural for Köppen to act as a go-between in the construction. Though the winch was being built in Hamburg, the motor for it was being built in Copenhagen, and there were all sorts of problems putting the designs together.

  For this and other reasons, Wegener traveled to Hamburg in June, to meet Köppen and try to work through the difficulties. Köppen, generous and gregarious, ran a perpetual “open house” at his residence in the Violastraße—a beautiful and rustic suburb close to his meteorological kite station, and some kilometers (by streetcar) outside Hamburg.21 Neither Wegener nor Köppen kept a record of this initial meeting and visit, but it is clear that they took an instant liking to one another and that Alfred enjoyed the generous openness of the Köppen household.22

  From Hamburg Alfred traveled on to Copenhagen, to superintend the final loading of his scientific equipment on board the expedition’s ship. His parents were to meet him shortly to tour the ship and would stay to see him off. He wrote excitedly to Köppen on 21 June—his last piece of correspondence before the scheduled departure three days later—to inform him that the packages of kites had arrived from Hamburg and that the canisters of hydrogen gas for the balloons had been safely stowed on board. The winch had still not arrived, though it had apparently been shipped from Hamburg on the nineteenth. Even if it did not arrive by the twenty-fourth, Alfred wrote, “all will not be lost. There is a ship departing for Iceland three days after we leave, to carry late arriving packages and etc. for us.”23

  Wegener’s final letter to Köppen, hurried and smudged, contains both his deep thanks for all of Köppen’s efforts on his behalf and an avowal of an obligation incurred: “Now it is up to me, upon the expedition’s return, to be able to lay good results before you.” He added, “Finally I wish to add my hope that on my return home I will again find you yourself and your honorable family full of health and vigor,” closing with, “and I hope you will remember me most kindly to your esteemed family.” The Köppen household—bustling, informal, filled with scientists and scientific work—made a powerful and lasting impression on Wegener, astonished to have passed in a matter of hours from a casual visitor to a “friend of the family.”24

  Voyaging

  The last few days before the expedition’s departure from Copenhagen were frantic—and thus no different from any other expedition. Their ship was a retired Norwegian sealer, the Magdalene, rechristened the Danmark. She was built of very thick oak and had a greatly enlarged forecastle to provide additional sleeping room and storage; rigged for sail, she also had an ancient and lumbering but still powerful one-cylinder engine. The crew and scientific staff, many already living on board, were working feverishly to stow three years’ worth of provisions and equipment below decks, though they were interrupted and even besieged by streams of onlookers, reporters, well-wishers, and dignitaries. Mylius-Erichsen had done everything he could to whip up enthusiasm and excitement about the expedition, writing articles emphasizing its importance and dangers. These newspaper reports brought hordes of curious spectators to Copenhagen’s long wharf, the Langlinie, where the Danmark was moored.

  Mylius-Erichsen was anxious to depart on schedule, even though many necessary instruments had not arrived, the stowing of the tons of material on deck was far from complete, and little was secured below: he had orchestrated the departure as a great public event, and he had the additional spur to depart on time (unbeknownst to the crew) that he had wildly and recklessly overspent his budget and feared that the expedition committee would see the bills and cancel the expedition before it left.25

  The ship departed on schedule from Copenhagen on 24 June before a cheering crowd. Wegener wondered (with a literary flourish) in his first journal entry of the voyage, “Will they also be so happy, when we return?”26 His parents, who had come to Copenhagen to see him off, were in the crowd along the quay as the ship set out, but he could not see them. His own mind, so long preoccupied with family, documents, packing, and preparations, could now turn to the voyage itself. He found himself assigned to share a cabin with Lt. Johan Peter Koch (1870–1928) of the Danish army, the expedition’s cartographer. Koch was a seasoned polar traveler, having made surveys in East Greenland in 1900 with Georg Amdrup (1866–1947) and having since worked for three years (1902–1904) surveying southern Iceland; he was also an experienced seaman and a qualified ships’ master.27 This cabin pairing of Koch and Wegener was a great kindness on the part of Mylius-Erichsen, as Koch spoke excellent German and would be Wegener’s closest scientific colleague on the trip. Language was still a problem for Wegener, and on the evening of this first day he turned again to his journal: “My ignorance of Danish is really annoying. I sit around most of the time without understanding a word, like a deaf-mute.”28

  The decks of the Danmark were a chaos of bales, boxes, and lumber, and there were already thirty Greenland sled dogs on board, barking and running about unrestrained; two of these already had litters of pups. The crew worked hard stowing and securing the loose cargo, and they did their best to get some sleep in their four hours of free time between watches. Koch and Wegener stood the second watch together; all hands (“the sailors and the scientists both,” noted Wegener) were to stand “watch and watch”—four hours on and four hours off, round the clock.29

  The Danmark sailed north up the Øresund, between Denmark and Sweden, and out into the Kattegat, over which Wegener had flown just three months before. Around noon the next day (25 June) the sea rose and the wind picked up sharply from the west. As the sails filled under their first real pressure since the refitting, the fore-topgallant yard (supporting the middle tier of sails on the foremast) snapped and was left dangling above the deck. It took the inexperienced crew until evening to lower the broken yard to the deck and assess the damage. The next morning, they were barely under way when the ship’s jib sheet parted and the sail, flapping about, tore from top to bottom. The Danmark, heavily overladen and out of trim, wallowed and rolled horribly, and all but the most experienced sailors were violently seasick and barely able to work. The topgallant yard, as it turned out, was rotten and would have to be replaced. Mylius-Erichsen decided to put in to the commercial port of Frederickhaven at the northern tip of Denmark and make repairs.30

  This embarrassment turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It was better to have things break and fail where repairs could be made rather than in Greenland, where they could not. The problems with the rigging were annoyances but easily made right. Other expeditions had had much worse luck. The Gauss had gone halfway round the world before Drygalski discovered that she was underpowered and unstable, that her winch was unable to raise the anchor, and that someone had neglected to mention to the designers that using pitch as insulation inside and out would be a disaster for a ship that had to sail through the tropics—where it all melted and ran.31 Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) was 2,000 miles from home on his way to the South Pole before he disco
vered that his specially commissioned snow boots, designed not to leak at the knee, were sewn so narrowly at the top that they could not be pulled over the men’s calves.32

  The most serious problem for the Danmark was the weight of her cargo. Over the next week, as the Danmark’s captain, Alf Trolle (1879–1949), superintended repairs to the yardarm and inspected and strengthened the rigging, he also ordered the ship to be drastically lightened. He put ashore twenty-four tons of coal that had been stored in the ’tween decks in sacks, along with six tons of sand ballast. He then had a barge brought alongside and had the ship completely unloaded and reloaded, this time with the cargo secured and the boats tied down.33

  When the ship left Denmark on 2 July, she was much more seaworthy. By 8 July she had covered half the distance to the Faeroe Islands, and the crew was winning the battle against seasickness. Wegener was finally able to write, “I’m very glad not to have been seasick. Early on I was queasy almost all the time, but I haven’t missed a watch or a meal. And this when the ship works so that everything that isn’t riveted or nailed down is constantly tossed about.… But now,” he added proudly, “even the most violent movements of the ship cause not a bit of discomfort.”34

  By 10 July the shipboard routine (and Wegener’s stomach) had settled to the point where he could begin to think about his scientific work. The stop in Frederickshaven had made clear how badly they had overestimated their cargo capacity, and yet they had more to take on board in both the Faeroes and Iceland. Many things would have to be left behind—there was simply no place to put them. The original scheme, involving manned stations at different points on the coast, would be abandoned, since the prefabricated hut needed to establish the second station would remain onshore in Iceland. This meant that Peter Freuchen (1886–1957), then a nineteen-year-old medical student who had signed on as a stoker, was out of a job, since the plan had called for him to man the second station. Mylius-Erichsen rechristened Freuchen as Wegener’s “meteorological assistant,” and, on 10 July, Wegener began to train Freuchen in the use of the instruments, beginning with the simplest—the anemometer. This effort seems to have reinvigorated Wegener: “In Iceland, I’ll set up the thermometer hut, and from there on take regular observations. I will also draft an observational program.”35

  The next morning, 11 July, they anchored in Transvaag Fjord on Syderø, the southernmost of the Faeroes, where they took on several kayaks and 100 more Greenland sled dogs, brought from West Greenland by the three remaining members of the expedition, all Greenlanders. The senior of these, Jørgen Brønlund (1877–1907), had traveled with Mylius-Erichsen in West Greenland in 1902–1904. With the arrival of the dogs, the fragile sense of order on board disappeared for the remainder of the voyage. There were no kennels or pens, and the exuberant, quarrelsome, half-wild creatures wandered everywhere, dominating the life of the ship. “The deck,” as Peter Freuchen recalled years later, “was soon covered with their discharges.”36 Almost no provision had been made for their food, and none at all for water; they were so ravenous and thirsty that nothing remotely edible could be left unattended for a moment. Nor were they safe themselves—in the first day of heavy sea on the way to Iceland three of them were swept overboard and lost.37

  From the Faeroes the Danmark plodded northwest to Iceland, arriving at the east-coast trading station of Eskifjördhur early on 18 July. The supply ship was there, as well as the answer to Wegener’s greatest worry: his kite winch was on board and his aerological program secured. Other delights awaited—there was mail from home, and a chance to wash their clothes. Wegener was overcome with the beauty of the place: “The mountains on the fjord are so beautiful, basalt terraces covered with green turf. In the harbor, just the two ships at anchor, a colorful picture.”38 He wanted very much to photograph it and immediately opened a box of his photographic plates. He was learning three-color photography, using sets of tinted glass plates that produced red, yellow, and cyan images when developed (this is what color films do today). These plates, when projected together on a screen, would give a composite color image. The chaos on board prevented him, however—the darkroom was filled to the ceiling with fur clothing hidden away from the dogs, and there was no place to store or develop the plates. Later in the morning, Lt. Koch took him ashore to buy necessities—including a set of oilskins and an Icelandic wool sweater. After lunch, Koch invited Alfred to accompany him and one of the expedition’s artists, the painter Aage Bertelsen (1873–1945), in the harbormaster’s launch to see the end of the fjord.39 It was (and is today) a stunning sight—a deep green valley extending from the end of the fjord westward far into the mountains, with great torrents plunging into the valley from some of the highest peaks on the east coast of Iceland.

  Back at the ship it was otherwise—endless, noisy, barely coordinated loading and unloading amidst the dogs. The crew was in deep mourning over Trolle and Mylius-Erichsen’s decision to send back to Denmark 8,000 bottles of beer, a gift of the Karlsburg Foundation. There was no room on board for the almost 400 cases of beer, weighing almost five tons. While they planned to carry (and did) into the Arctic prodigious quantities of alcohol, this would now be limited to spirits, some cases of port, and a little champagne for the most festive occasions. The oversupply of champagne (many cases thereof) was to be sent back to Denmark as well, but the crew vigorously protested and prevailed on Mylius-Erichsen to let them break it out and drink it all.40 The party lasted for three days and nights and gave Wegener his first view of the anarchic vigor of his Danish companions.

  The departure from Iceland on 21 July marked the real beginning of the expedition. They sailed northeast for several days and then struck a northerly course, reaching the Arctic Circle on the twenty-fifth. Wegener noted disconsolately in his journal, “This evening we crossed the Arctic Circle completely without ceremony.”41 He had been anticipating the sort of organized horseplay associated with “line-crossing” ceremonies at sea, in which “King Neptune” appears to demand tribute from all first-time line crossers. This usually involves having one’s head shaved, or being forced to drink some sort of vile concoction, or having to kiss the “Sea-Hag,” or, in the case of the Arctic Circle, having one’s nose painted blue. None of this materialized, however; the crew was still trying to recover from the festivities in Iceland.

  Day by day the wind was sharply colder. Even in July the sea temperature just north of Iceland is only a degree or two above 0°C (32°F), as the East Iceland Current brings polar water southward; the temperature of the air is only a few degrees warmer. The rapid cooling was all the more noticeable because they were making terrific headway, climbing a degree and sometimes two degrees of latitude per day. By the twenty-eighth they were almost 72° north, and the nights were becoming bitter in the unheated cabins. The crew was issued reindeer pelts as blankets—something of a milestone in itself. Fridtjof Nansen—and there was not a man on board who had not read Nansen—had praised their warmth and utility; they had become a sort of talisman of polar adventure. “I was issued a reindeer pelt yesterday,” wrote Wegener, “but Koch cooled my rapture by informing me that I had most likely inherited a hundred lice with it. In his opinion, all Greenlanders have lice, and all furs that come from them. We have therefore brought the corpus delecti under medical supervision by dusting it with insect powder.”42

  On 30 July, at about 75° north, they encountered the outer fringes of the pack ice that guards the coast of Greenland. “Yesterday we saw the first pack ice! These are gorgeous tableaux,” he wrote, “these wonderful, lustrous shapes! I was amazed by the beauty of it all.”43 He was captivated by this world from the first moment he saw it, and he wanted to capture it, as well. “I can’t get it on film,” he fumed; “it’s too dark.” He was gratified to see that Bertelsen shared his aesthetic excitement and had rushed on deck to paint it, immediately.44

  Captain Trolle turned the ship due west, and they made remarkable progress toward the coast of Greenland, covering half the estimated width of the ic
e pack in a single day and night between 31 July and 1 August. Karl Ring (1870–1918), the ice pilot, sailed and powered the ship through open leads of water between the scattered floes, passing an occasional iceberg, but never close to danger. “No expedition has ever had such an easy passage,” wrote Wegener excitedly. This was true: the German North Polar Expedition of 1869–1870 had landed in these latitudes but had lost one of its ships, the Hansa, to the ice. Nansen’s expedition in 1888 had tried to force the ice here and had been swept hundreds of miles to the south in the Greenland Current.45 On the Danmark, for the moment, there was little for Wegener to do but admire the scene: “In the evening and all night a thin, uniform layer of fog lies over the sea everywhere, and the midnight sun floods it with a pale yellow light—a wonderfully moody atmosphere.”46

  On 4 August 1906 the Danmark entered the thick pack ice, and there began the dangerous pas des deux between ice and ship, as Ring continually forced the ship forward, backed off, and pushed again. Wegener could not stop looking at the ice. “Today,” he noted breathlessly, “I spent an hour in the crow’s nest. The vista in clear weather over the ice is beautiful beyond all measure. There is nothing that does not radiate color! The blue water, the clean, white ice, the yellowish-red sun, the light green of the floes under the water—enchanting. Out of the ice comes every shade of color. We saw an ice floe turned an intense violet by the sun. We photograph now madly, it is all too fantastic.”47